The Innovator’s Guide to Employee Advocacy:

LESSONS FROM 5

FORTUNE 200 BRANDS

Innovative marketing and communications leaders are all dealing with the

same problem: how can their message get heard above all the other noise?

Top brands and hot start-ups that are succeeding in today’s always on world have discovered

a solution: Employee Advocacy. According to Forbes, the majority of Fortune 1000 companies

will implement an Employee Advocacy platform within the next one to two years. It stands to

reason, if a brand can engage their employees with brand content and even more — inspire

them to share that content — they grow their business too.

2Abstract

Real examples and results from

Fortune 200 brands, such as Gap,

Target, AT&T, and more!

Specific steps so you can execute

your Employee Advocacy goals

faster and better.

How to get in touch with experts to

gain Employee Advocacy strategy

and solutions specific to your brand

READ THIS

EBOOK

TO LEARN:

Abstract

Intro: Employee Engagement in

the Virtual Era

How the Corporate Communications

Leaders at Gap, Inc. Achieved Executive

Buy-in

Nestlé Purina’s Secrets for Recruiting the

Best Employee Advocacy Test Group

How AT&T Trained Thousands of

Employee Advocates in Just 2

Minutes a Day

Target’s Winning Strategy to

Launching and Scaling Employee

Advocacy to Thousands

What Makes Microsoft Dynamics’

Employee Advocates Engage Everyday

Conclusion: What Your Employees

Need to Know Today and Tomorrow

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What’s Inside

Innovative marketing and communications leaders are all dealing with the

same problem: how can their message get heard above all the other noise?

3Intro

Intro: Employee Engagement in the Virtual Era

Innovative marketing and communications leaders are all dealing with the same

problem: how can their message get heard above all the other noise?

Top brands that are succeeding in today’s always-on world have discovered a solution: Employee Advocacy.

According to Forbes, the majority of Fortune 1000 companies will implement an Employee Advocacy platform

within the next one to two years. It stands to reason, if a brand can engage their employees with brand content

and even more — inspire them to share that content — they grow their business too.

To do this, innovative communications leaders at Fortune 200 brands, like Gap, Target, AT&T and more are rising

above the noise and engaging their employees with Employee Advocacy programs. In return, their employees

are report higher levels of engagement with the brand from consuming and sharing brand, while also becom-

ing thought leaders by sharing relevant third party industry information. By simply providing employees with a

one-stop shop to access relevant company and industry news and information, these brands engage their employees

wherever they are. Employee Advocacy is the next step in employee engagement for the virtual era.

This ebook won’t tell you why Employee Advocacy

is important — you already know that.

Instead, be prepared to learn how groundbreaking Employee Advocacy programs

were launched to thousands of employees at Fortune 200 brands and how Employee

Advocacy has forever changed the way these brands will engage employees.

Lesson 1: How to Secure Executive Buy-In

4Lesson 1

How the Corporate Communications Leaders at Gap, Inc. Achieved Executive Buy-in

Chances are, the employees at your company are already active online, seeking out relevant industry content

and sharing about their brand on social media. Research from Gallup shows, 50% of employees share about their

company on social media — without any encouragement or training. So, why not harness employees’ power to

share? This is exactly what Sonia Fiorenza, previously the Sr. Director of Digital Communications at Gap, Inc. asked

the executive team at Gap when she pitched the employee advocacy program to them and won the approval for

her team to launch the initiative to the entire company.

Said Fiorenza, “We found [at Gap] that all employees — not just marketing — were thrilled to

have the opportunity to help the company by advocating for the brand on social media.” But

first, the executive team needed to get onboard and set an example for employees.

Here are the two steps Fiorenza took to get all Employee Advocacy stakeholders

excited about the program:

Show them the data: Focus on research and data to achieve executive buy-in for the employee advocacy

program, advises Fiorenza. Information, such as how many employees are already sharing and what other

brands have been able to achieve, will win over leadership.

Partner with human resources and legal early: At Gap, Fiorenza brought human resources and legal into the

conversation early-on. She recognized that they were key stakeholders in the program and could advocate

for it’s launch once they had a full understanding of how it would modernize company policies (especially for

social media), and support employees. “At Gap, our legal team even became our program’s biggest advocates

internally because we involved them early,” said Fiorenza. achieve, will win over leadership.

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Gap was able to see early success in their Employee Advocacy program because of

leadership’s full support. Employees were motivated to share about their brand and felt

more connected to the company. Said Fiorenza, “Gap employees are excited to have their

social media posts recognized and retweeted by their brand! It’s the top way to thank

them for their engagement.”

5Lesson 1

To find out more, hear from Sonia Fiorenza herself in the webinar:

Proven Employee Advocacy Secrets from Global Fortune 2000 Social Media Directors

WATCH IT HERE

Lesson 2: How to Recruit the Best Test Group

6Lesson 2

Nestlé Purina’s Secrets for Recruiting the Best Employee Advocacy Test Group

Here are the 4 steps that Nestlé Purina took to

launch their Employee Advocacy test group.

Recruit test group participants: The best test group

participants for your Employee Advocacy program

should come from departments that are already

active on social media — like marketing and PR —

as well as key stakeholders such as legal and HR.

By including these key stakeholders, said Lee, she

was able to ensure their support for the program.

Train employees in-person: “We trained the small

test group in person,” said Lee, “This helped

employees feel safe and comfortable when sharing

about the brand on social media.”

Provide a variety of content to test: SocialChorus

and Purina partnered to strategize on the type of

content to provide employees for the program

test. Said Lee, “You have to provide brand content

that employees will feel comfortable sharing and

that is varied so they aren’t spamming their

social networks.”

Set test program goals and track results: Purina was

delighted to see the 40 employees in the socially-

active test group sharing at least two to three times

a week. This gave them enough data to test which

content was the most engaging, and which days had

the highest employee engagement. Said Lee, “I track

results in the platform every week.”

When Laura Lee, Social Media and Corporate Communications Manager at Nestlé Purina, decided to

launch an Employee Advocacy program at Purina, she decided to start out by testing the program with

the most social media-savvy employees. Says Lee, “At Purina, we are all about testing and learning. I

found about 40 people who I knew were either creating content for our brand or who were already

active on social media.”

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The Employee Advocacy test group

The Employee Advocacy test group enabled Lee to gather the

data and feedback she needed. Said Lee, “We were able to take

the learnings from the Employee Advocacy test group and get

the program ready to scale to all employees with much success.”

To find out more, listen to our webinar recording,

Unleash Your Advocates: Nestlé Purina Shares the Secrets to Training Emplyee Advocates

WATCH IT HERE

WATCH THE VIDEO AND

SEE FOR YOURSELF:

8Lesson 3

Lesson 3: How to Quickly Train Employees

How AT&T Trained Thousands of Employee Advocates in Just 2 Minutes a Day

AT&T has thousands of employees who are trained to speak on behalf of their brand online. They

make up AT&T’s Employee Advocacy program, the AT&T Social Circle. How did AT&T train thousands

without breaking the bank or taking up all of their employees’ time going over the ins and outs of so-

cial media? Believe it or not, they accomplished this feat by creating a fun, engaging and simple video

that only takes two minutes to watch.

Video: Join Our Social Circle!

Here are the seven important

points that AT&T covers that

every employee advocate will

need to know:

What is the program about? The narrator begins

by describing what AT&T Social Circle is and why it

matters to the employee.

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How can employees get started? Next, AT&T covers

the vital but simple step of telling employees how to

connect their social media accounts to the platform.

Very important, now the employees can share.

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WATCH IT HERE

What safety measures do employees need to know? AT&T makes sure to mention that employees

need to include the program’s hashtag (#ATTEmployees) so it’s clear to their social networks that

they are sharing on behalf of their brand.

Can employees customize their posts? Yes, AT&T makes sure to encourage employees to use

their own voice to share with on social media.

Can they say anything?! AT&T reminds employees very simply (to make it easy to remember)

exactly what information they can’t share (such as financial information). Most of this is common

sense and employees only want to share content from the platform. We call that “freedom within a

framework.”

How should employees handle negative social media posts? AT&T makes it very clear that their

employees should just ignore any negativity said about the brand on social media. They have pro-

fessionals who are trained specifically to respond to complaints.

Where can employees ask questions? AT&T provides employees resources where they can access

more information or even contact someone who can answer their question.

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Can you believe they cover all that in just two minutes? Consult your professional

Twitter-experts to come up with short and engaging training content that covers all the bases, but

doesn’t take up too much of your new Employee Advocacy members’ time.

READ IT HERE

Want to learn more about how to train employee advocate?

Take a look at our ebook, How to Train Employee Advocates, Your Guide

to Activating 100 Employees in Just 30 Days (or less).

WATCH IT HERE

(BTW — The SocialChorus platform can embed this hashtag so it’s included in every social

media share from the platform. We like make it easy for ya.)

Lesson 4: How to Scale to Thousands

10Lesson 4

Target’s Winning Strategy to Launching and Scaling Employee Advocacy to Thousands

SocialChorus data shows that it only takes 135 employee advocates to outreach a branded social media page with

one million followers — now imagine what thousands of employees could do. That’s exactly what Target Corporation

discovered when they launched their Employee Advocacy program, #TargetScoop, at the company’s annual summit

to 20,000 employees.

Nancy Brandt, Sr. Specialist in Communications at Target, wanted to empower employees at Target by giving them

access to company news and information before the public. There’s no shortage of content about Target — from

media coverage and marketing campaigns to its own online magazine and social media channels, there’s a lot of

discussion around the brand. But employees didn’t know what was safe to share publicly and needed an easy way to

access company news. Spearheading the change was Brandt, who said, “The Employee Advocacy program is about

empowering our team members — and making it very easy for them to consume and share content they find mean-

ingful.”

To launch the program to thousands, Brandt took these three steps:

Select an Employee Advocacy

platform: Says Brandt,

“SocialChorus allowed us to

aggregate content and provide a

one-stop shop where our team

members could easily share ‘safe’

and accurate content to their

social media channels from that

site.”

Launch and promote the program

at an event: Target launched the

program to 20,000 employees at

the company’s annual summit.

They provided employees training,

in-person guidance on how to get

started and content to share.

Give employees exclusive access

to content: At the Target annual

summit, the brand gave the

thousands of #TargetScoop early

adopters the opportunity to be

the first to announce the brand’s

new partnership with TOMS on

social media.

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Since launch, 1000 new employees have joined the program every month to view, read

and share company and relevant industry content. These employees also report feeling

more connected and engaged with the brand.

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To find out more about the #TargetScoop Program, hear from Nancy Brandt herself

in the webinar: How Target Scaled Employee Advocacy to Thousands

WATCH IT HERE

Lesson 5: How to Continually Engage Employee Advocates

12Lesson 5

What Makes Microsoft Dynamics’ Employee Advocates Engage Everyday

The social media team at Microsoft Dynamics wanted to unite their network of employees and partners to con-

sume and share relevant industry and brand content — on one platform. Said Kelly Rigotti, Senior Marketing and

Communications Manager at Microsoft Dynamics, “Our employees and partners weren’t comfortable sharing on

social media, so we wanted to make it easy for them to access, read and share content.” What Microsoft Dynam-

ics ended up with was an extremely engaged community of employee and partner advocates.

Rigotti and her team at Microsoft Dynamics drove employee adoption and engagement —

creating a program that has 3X the usual engagement of any other SocialChorus program

— by uploading content into the platform every day. The content in their Employee

Advocacy program includes:

Third party industry content Business innovation

Company news and

product releases

Employee and partner-

submitted content

To find out more about the how Microsoft Dynamics engaged hundreds of employees, listen

to their webinar: How Microsoft Dynamics Helps Employees and Partners be Advocates

In just 90 days, hundreds of employees and partners joined Microsoft Dynamics’

employee advocacy program and drove thousands of social media engagements. “Our

employees and partners have access to social media communities that respect their point

of view,” says Rigotti, “Our goal was to give them access to content that they’d want to

share, not tell them what to share.”

WATCH IT HERE

Conclusion: What Your Employees Need to Know Today and Tomorrow

Engage thousands of employees — in just 2 minutes a day

The modern workforce needs a modern employee engagement solution. Which is why the majority of For-

tune 1000 companies will implement an Employee Advocacy platform within the next one to two years. Your

organization needs a solution that combines the best practices from the largest Employee Advocacy programs in

the world to drive adoption and engagement.

89% of your employees’ time spent on mobile is spent using

mobile apps, you should have a place on their home screen.

Our employee advocacy app earns you the right to be there.

The SocialChorus platform is a proven solution for brands to

leverage employee advocacy within their organization.

CALL US: 415.780.8812

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